UPDATE 2:Slavery in the UK. The unemployed are being forced to work for major British corporations, for free, just so they can continue to receive their unemployment benefits. This plan is the same as one attempted here in the states, one that still has a great deal of support in congress. Imagine the profits retailers could pocket if they got free seasonal workers during the holiday buying season.

UPDATE: In Dubai, one of our close economic allies, they call slave owners “sponsors” and fine their slaves if they attempt to take their own lives when the desperation of their true situation becomes too unbearable to live with.

“I found myself thrown away and I thought of my poor family back home. I felt desperate and decided I should die,” she said. The National

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While Americans cheer for the return of zebra striped officials to the NFL games today, the Spanish, the Greeks and many others across Europe are fighting for their very lives and the freedom to determine the quality of them on their own. Our apparent lack of concern is understandable when you consider that what they are desperately struggling against is in a large part, our creation. Not only is Dr. Frankenstein disinterested in the harm his creation inflicts on the people around him by choice, but the townsfolk themselves willingly turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the cries of their neighbors in nearby villages just so long as the monster feeds elsewhere.

Below is a list of current (2011) dictatorships and authoritarian ruled nations as compiled by the Freedom House. The nation states in RED are openly free market/neoliberal and supported by the United States of America or other neoliberal nations.

Below is a list of countries classified as NOT FREE in 2011 (authoritarian regimes/dictatorships) by the Freedom House:

“I work hard, but my grades don’t matter. But I have a voice and I will be heard!”

Jordan is 13, and she’s speaking to a crowd of mostly adults, sitting on the granite steps of the New York City Department of Education at Tweed Hall. Or rather, she is speaking through them, as her words echo through the people’s mic used at Occupy Wall Street just few blocks south from where she’s speaking.

Tonight the steps of the DOE have been occupied and are packed with teachers, students, parents, and supporters holding a general assembly on the state of public education in New York.

Up to 3,000 New York firefighters and their supporters demonstrated this weekend against billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to close down 20 fire companies across the city.

Hundreds marched from the fire station that houses Engine Company 205 in Brooklyn Heights across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall in lower Manhattan, where their ranks swelled to 3,000 as they demonstrated against Bloomberg’s latest attack on fire protection.

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

“This frontal attack on public education is highlighted by the fact that Bloomberg will allocate an increase of $139 million to charter schools next year.”

New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg last Friday announced $600 million in budget cuts for the city’s Fiscal Year 2012, which will begin on July 1.

A recent protest in Manhattan against the education cuts

Bloomberg’s $65.77 billion proposed budget, which, according to law, must be balanced and approved by the city council by June 30, includes the elimination of over 6,000 teaching positions in the public schools, plans to close 20 fire companies and cuts to youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.

Over $500 million dollars will be eliminated from the city’s Department of Education. Out of the 6,166 teaching positions eliminated, 4,600 would be cut through the layoffs of teachers. The school system, the largest in the United States, has a million students and over 75,000 teachers.